I remember him being gifted a golden pager and I’m still holding out hope that he gets the call.

Now that is an ambition to strive for! Easily one of the most significant communal projects of our time which, despite still remaining almost unheard of to countless people who unknowingly rely upon it, would be such a remarkable honor to take part in.

Same boat except my Arduino and Pi devices are still gathering dust (but I do want to eventually get a general, foundational knowledge of electronics). My own ideas most often devolve into timesinks that leave me questioning how I even convinced myself to start down that road. I like doing dev stuff more if it happens when an update breaks something, like a service or a plugin to some app I host. “Hey, that’s a goddamn puzzle! I fucking love puzzles!” And there’s the underlying fact that, if I manage to solve it, I might be helping somebody else out. Some psychological compulsion to help others that I can identify but still not deny.

Anyway, I might never end up a “contributor” to anything else but one of my biggest highs was singlehandedly debugging, submitting, and having a fix merged to a Jellyfin plugin I use. From first reporting it and thinking out loud about it in the app’s Discord, to poking through the source on GitHub (in a language I’ve never touched), I worked it out in a few hours and even compiled a replacement .dll for my own use until the merge was accepted. To the reception of some compliments and pats on the back from regulars on the server that, at the risk of over sharing, did more for my emotional well being than my last lay. The problem ended up being a simple order-of-operations issue but the experience was the sort of the thing that makes a guy, who hasn’t worked so much as a help desk position, briefly think “Maybe I could hack it.”

Conversely, my biggest low was wasting 45 minutes on an Advent of Code problem because I forgot to switch from the sample data to my actual puzzle data in the second half. It was a first-week problem, probably child’s play for any pro, but I had a working solution fast enough to have landed on that day’s leaderboard. It would’ve been entirely self serving and good for nothing but bragging rights. Instead I wasted nearly an hour to reach the “duh” moment and subsequent self loathing. I wanted those bragging rights!

The TLDR is Programming turns bipolar disorder into a speed run session too easily for it to be more than an on-again off-again hobby or the occasional necessity for me. I can’t fathom how the actual pros, especially those in prestigious and lucrative positions, keep from crashing out or falling into imposter syndrome any time they let themselves get caught up in an off-by-one or some other nonsense.

I don’t have the link(s) on hand but there’s a Tizen build of Jellyfin for Samsung TVs. It runs rather slow on my old tube so I wouldn’t recommend it outside of a last resort. It’s actually smoother for me to just open the app on the TV and then remote control it from a browser/app on another device (my Steam Deck is my homelab universal remote). But you can use the Tizen dev tools or a simpler docker container to push it to the TV.

For my folks I got a cheap Walmart brand Android box (Onn 4k Plus). I installed Jellyfin from the app store then black hole’d the thing because I’m wary of cheap Android apps and their history of supply chain attacks. It’s much more responsive and also leaves me with the option of installing additional stuff like Smart Tubes, Retro Arch and whatnot.

Sierra’s “Red Baron II” (1998) might not be my favorite but it had some of the most memorable music for me. Repetitive military marches with the main theme being rather jaunty. It didn’t hurt that it was my first flight sim and the first PC game I’d ever played online. I was around twelve at the time so it’s hard not to remember how cool it all was to me.

I’m a fucking dolt that dabbles and picks up the gist of things pretty quick, but I’m not authority on anything, so “grain of salt”:

You’re already familiar with OCR so my naive approach (assuming consistent fields on the documents where you can nab name, case no., form type, blah blah) would be to populate a simple sqlite db with that data and the full paths to the files. But I can write very basic SQL queries, so for your pops you might then need to cobble together some sort of search form. Something for people that don’t learn SELECT filepath FROM casedata WHERE name LIKE "%Luigi%"; because they had to manually repair their Jellyfin DB one time when a plugin made a bunch of erroneous entries >:|